Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Informal Press Meet at Search Camp event

As part of the advisory board of Search Camp, I was asked by the organizers to interact with Press. The actual meeting was quite informal and was held in the canteen of Tidel park on 6th October at 11.30 am. Vikram from Efficient Frontier, myself, Mr C R Venkatesh from Dot com Infoway, and a few members of knowledge foundation were to interact with people from Press.

S Shyamala from Financial Express, Judy Franko from exchange 4 Media and Vankatachari Jagannathan from Domain-b were part of the press team. After a brief introduction of other such events organized by Knowledge Foundation the questions from press people (and even from some members from Knowledge foundation) was basically to explain the SEO / SEM and other such jargons. Ezhil Raja started off by explaining why Search Marketing industry is important and hence the importance of conducting such a seminar.

Vikram talked about Pay per click and gave a few estimations of the industry size. The members of Press were pretty interested in knowing our views on the future of advertising. I told that US is basically the benchmark to see global trends in advertising. I gave example of Google offering Print, Television and Radio ads to its clients in US. Online being a ROI driven medium it would offer additional pressure on the offline model to show performance. Since there was no Wifi at the café, we were finding it difficult to explain difference between organic and paid search results in Google. Luckily I had a presentation in my laptop about this and we showed it to the members of press.

In terms of challenges facing the industry, I said that that there is a serious lack of talent in the industry and not many students are aware that Search Marketing is a very bright career option.

S Shyamala was quite interested in knowing why The Hindu shows up for most search results in South India. I told her that it might be because they have invested in SEO. I follow the Indian Express website (I love reading news on this website) and hence told her that the new Content management System which Indian Express has migrated to seems to be more SEO friendly and maybe they will also see some good rankings. She was more interested in knowing about Search Engine Optimization and how it works.

Conversation then shifted to Click Fraud and how it affects our industry. We had few light moments during this discussion as Mr V Jagannathan seemed to be quite interested in how one makes money from Click Fraud. We teased him a bit about this. Its good that the press is aware of Click Fraud because we need their help in fighting this menace.

At this point we concluded our meet and left for the next session at Search Camp.